Are Louis Vuitton’s Artist Collaborations Nearing Their End?

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Marc Jacobs convinced Louis Vuitton to design handbags in collaboration with artists Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. The resulting enthusiasm and sales numbers were enormous. The label’s latest collaborative handbags, designed by Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo in honor of Louis Vuitton’s 40th anniversary, will go on sale Wednesday at a pop-up shop in Tokyo. In a lengthy article in WWD about the Kawakubo partnership, Marc Jacobs reveals that unlike the Murakami and Prince projects, he had no creative input on the bag collection Kawakubo created in Vuitton’s signature monogram pattern. He also said he doesn’t feel the need to continue the Vuitton collaborations despite pressure from the higher-ups and hinted he thinks they’re getting a little out of control:

“I’ve kind of warned everybody up there that I think they’ve gotten a little too into this idea which, I mean, is great,” Jacobs said. “I’m glad that everybody gets behind it, but what they don’t realize is that I do it at a pace that maintains the brand’s integrity and seems really right, and I think that sometimes everybody loves a good idea so much that they kind of go too far and it kind of kills it.”

So is the next Louis Vuitton collaboration further off than we might have thought? Is it coming at all? Could Marc be shifting his obsessive energies from contemporary art to something else? Whatever he cooks up next, we can’t imagine he won’t deliver.